"But you'll try and love me? I would make you—you said I might," he murmured, as though coaxing trust from a child.
"No," she said, disengaging her hand and brushing it across her eyes as if to sweep away a blighting memory. "No, it was then I knew myself, then I took courage to face the future without him—without you——"
"But because you refuse him, why——"
"I will not become a thief. Because my own gold has been filched and squandered I should be no less a thief were I to fill my purse with what I can never earn—never repay."
"My love is a free gift, Carol—I don't make reservations," he mumbled, hopelessly, for he knew her tones dictated rather than argued.
"Won't you see that it is because your gift is so lavish, so rare—because I cannot return—I cannot take it? Offerings of real worth cannot be so accepted without degradation. Dear Yate, good-bye. Some day when you have recovered this you will know I am right. Perhaps, even, you may place me, faults and all, in some special heart-niche reserved for defunct yet exotic truths."
She affected flippancy, but her mirth hung lank, like the curls of a drowning man.
He bent over her hand and kissed it.
Then he said thickly, in a drunkard's voice, "I'll go ... by the garden way——" and rushed out.
She heard the conservatory door bang behind him, and lost the sound of his footsteps in the howl of the storm.